While Apple and Adobe’s little tussle over Steve Job’s adamant stand to not let Flash on the iPad, people from other companies have been trying to create tablet computers running other mobile OS’s that can run Flash. One such operating system that can run Flash would be Google’s Android.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Zedomax stumbled upon a prototype Android tablet at the Adobe booth. The prototype seemed to run Android OS 2.1 but more importantly, ran Adobe’s Flash and Air. The site
claims that both Adobe’s technologies worked “flawlessly” and were “totally impressed by how it ran”.

We’re not sure how the Flash-enabled tablet would behave if we multi-tasked extensively but it’s good to hear that non-iPad users will be able to enjoy Flash and Air content in the near future.

This here is the future of gaming, folks. One day in the not-so-distant future, we’ll be playing games on our browsers – without any plugins of some sort.

Played Quake Live before? If you haven’t I suggest you do it – it’s an excellent port of Quake Arena with better graphics, and you play on your browser. However, it uses a plugin, so it’s not exactly the most optimal way to play games on your browser. Same goes for Flash-based games like Farmville.

So what if you can play Quake 2 on your browser – with no plug-in needed? All you need to do it woud be HTML 5 and WebGL. And Google has pulled it off, apparently. Check out the video demo:

They started off with Bytonic Software’s Jake2, a Java port of the open source Quake engine. From there, they re-compiled the engine using the Google Web Toolkit (also OSS), created a WebGL renderer to display the graphics, moved multiplayer communications from UDP to WebSockets (part of the HTML5 spec), and bolted on an emulated filesystem to allow game and preference saves.

However, I’ve looked for the download link in the Google Code page. I can’t find it anywhere. [Read more…]

By now, everybody knows of Apple’s stand regarding Flash Player in their iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock all this time, Steve Jobs and company don’t want no Flash Player in their touch-screen gizmos, because they don’t feel that Adobe has been making a great Mac browser plugin. In fact, they’re blaming Flash for a huge percentage of Safari crashes in Mac.

Adobe has been trying real hard to strike back at Apple’s insistence that the rest of the web should hurry up and ditch Flash for HTML 5. An Adobe employee blogged about how the iPad’s browsing experience will pretty much suck because it doesn’t support Flash, and now they’re quickly developing Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Google Android. [Read more…]